The present invention relates generally to the field of service availability, and more particularly to the potential risk of a resource involved in providing the service becomes unavailable.
Service availability is an important metric of systems that provide a service to users. Typically, service availability is measured by uptime, or the amount of time users can access a service over a given period of time. For the time that a service is unavailable, the service accrues downtime during the given period of time. The ratio of uptime versus downtime indicates a service's availability. High service availability is sought after by service providers, since large portions of downtime greatly impact users' access to the service.